A book by Kent Law School Lecturer Dr Rose Parfitt draws on new archival research, and both anti-colonial and Marxist theory, to offer a critical examination of the role of international law in establishing and perpetuating inequalities of wealth, power and pleasure.
The Process of International Legal Reproduction: Inequality, Historiography, Resistance is published by Cambridge University Press. It has been chosen as the subject of a number of symposia, including a review symposium, to be published later this year by the London Review of International Law, and a book panel at the American Society of Legal History’s 2019 conference with Professor Christopher Tomlins (Berkeley), Professor Anthony Anghie (Utah/National University of Singapore), Professor Nate Holden (Drake) and Dr Genevieve Painter (Concordia).
In her book, Dr Parfitt develops a new ‘modular’ legal historiography to make sense of the paradoxical relationship between sovereign equality and inequality both at the level of the sovereign state and the individual subject of rights. She juxtaposes a series of seemingly unrelated histories against one another, including a radical re-examination of the canonical story of Fascist Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, to expose the conditional nature of the process through which international law creates and disciplines new states and their subjects.
Dr Parfitt sourced new archive materials in Addis Ababa, Rome, Geneva and London in her exploration of the legal dynamics of oppression and resistance. Her research, part of a wider project entitled ‘International Law and the Legacies of Fascist Internationalism’, was funded by a Discovery Early Career Research Award (2016-19) from the Australian Research Council.
The book has been endorsed by a number of leading scholars of international law and legal history, including Professor Nathaniel Berman (Brown), Professor Christoper Tomlins (Berkeley) and Professor Martti Koskenniemi (Helsinki). Professor Koskenniemi described the book as “wonderfully engaging and important”. He said: ‘Out of a sophisticated, non-dogmatic Marxist perspective on international law and history, Rose Parfitt develops an analysis of the fundamental inequality of the international legal system by a complex reading of the Italian invasion of Abyssinia in the 1930s and the treatment of the matter by the Great Powers and the League of Nations in Geneva. Including the perspective of the Ethiopians themselves and situating the events in the larger history of Western power and on military and diplomatic manoeuvres in the “Orient”, she constructs the most inspired – and inspiring – postcolonial study of modern statehood and international law that I have read.’
Dr Parfitt’s research is focused on the development of a new set of techniques aimed at uncovering, making sense of and challenging international law’s role in the creation and preservation of inequalities around the world. Her work, both individual and collaborative, involves the bringing together of words, images and sounds – and of traditions dedicated to analysing words, images and sounds – in order to find more effective ways of getting at the legal past and its material consequences for the human and non-human world. To this end, she has published widely on topics including the doctrine of sources; the relationship between the state and the individual; fascist colonial architecture in Libya; Futurism and contemporary fashion; the League of Nations and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia; Bakhtin’s theories of the dialogic and the chronotope; and the Bandung Conference, among others.
Dr Parfitt teaches undergraduate law in the areas of Public Law and International Humanitarian Law at Kent and is a Senior Fellow at Melbourne Law School. She also teaches regularly at Harvard Law School’s Institute for Global Law and Policy workshops.
The book is available from the Cambridge University Press website at a discount of 20% with code: PARFITT2019